TINYhr, the company behind the TINYpulse anonymous staff feedback tool I reviewed a few months ago, has taken the basic premises of that tool — frequent simple web app feedback, and anonymous where sensible  — and has rolled it into a new solution for getting similar feedback from clients. This new product is CLIENTpulse, and I think it its virtues are the same as TINYpulse: creating a tight feedback loop to take the pulse of clients’ engagement with a company’s services, products, and support.

Here you see the CLIENTpulse dashboard, condensing the results of three questions. At the top is the Happiness Index, computed by a weighting of the responses to ‘How likely would you refer our offering to a colleague or friend?’ 9 or 10 is considered good, and all lower values are weighted negatively, which is why an average of 8.8 leads to a 56 Index.

The second and third questions offer additional ways for the company to engage with customers: those that are contemplating dropping the company’s offerings, or fllowing up with those making suggestions.

Among other views, the tool allows drilling down to individual responses, like this one. Speaking with David Niu, the CEO of TINYhr, he used this example as indicative of something that happened when he was using CLIENTpulse to get feedback on TINYpulse use. A customer said that uptake in his organization was a problem, so TINYpulse got a support specialist involved to investigate and make some recommendations, which led to that customer being turned around.

I think that anecdote is a great rationale for the tool: rapid feedback has enormous benefits.

The value of rapid feedback is especially true during the early stages of a customer’s use of a product or service, as I recently wrote regarding the social CRM tool, Intercom:

The company [Intercom] has positioned itself in a great and growing market, supporting growth-oriented tech companies that want a deep and close relationship with clients, especially during the earliest stages of onboarding and initial use. That transition zone is where proactive outreach and ‘speedback’ on features and functionality is critical.

In a time when products and services are constantly being updated and new features or capabilities are being rolled out experimentally, rapid ‘speedback’ is increasingly essential. And services like CLIENTpulse are therefore equally essential.

There’s another observation to offer up: as social tools define our internal and external communications, they start to feel more and more alike, until the differences between HR and CRM diminish. It’s all social feedback, more alike than different.